How do you experience and handle reviews and feedback about your games, positive and negative? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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How do you experience good and bad reviews and feedback on your games? Are you ecstatic or proud when reading positive reviews? Is it difficult to read reviews listing a lot of negative points?

How does it depend on the proportion of your contributions to the project?

I've occasionally wondered about team titles, how individual developers feel when reviews turn out majority or overwhelmingly negative. For very small teams and individual devs, I've often wondered how they feel when receiving "negative" feedback, especially reviews pointing out many flaws.

Today, I posted a Steam review with a long list of things the title is lacking. Personally, I would have never released a title in that state, and for money. I feel bad about pointing out many flaws on indie titles. But I also see no way around it. It's only honest to list what I see and notice. For a review, honesty is key, and allows others to see these things that are not visible from a store page or game trailer.

I'm interested to hear your thoughts and experiences.

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[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Its hard lol. I rarely take pride on positives and mostly dwell on the negatives. Not good or healthy but what are you going to do.

Flaws are hard. I've gotten some pretty brutal review smackdowns for things that were largely out of my control, or things I was aware of but couldn't fix in a satisfying way, and that just feels awful.

But on the flip side I got reviews that pointed out issues I had never seen or even noticed, or worded it in a way that clarified the issue, and those are helpful.

All you can really do is remember the dev is human at the end of the day. Full of flaws and likely jumped on a project too ambitious for their own good.

this post was submitted on 26 May 2025

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